Diagrams Series 3: A Retrospective Introduction


Diagrams Series 3 was originally published on paper as an ad-hoc circulation in 1979. Some of these poems appeared in the magazine Interstate 14, edited by Loris Essary and Mark Loeffler. These pieces represent my earliest published diagram work. They were printed on a dot matrix printer as two-page, 132-row spreads, and were originally created on an 8-bit 2MHz 8080 computer running CP/M in a word processing program called Metatype, of which I was the author.

The diagram poems began their life as hand-drawn experiments on paper in 1968. My recollection is that their first public showing was as part of an installation titled Permanent and Temporary Poetry 5/75 at The Kitchen in New York, in which both diagrams and an earlier polylinear form I call word nets were constructed on the walls and floor. That installation included some elements that are difficult to implement even today, such as a node ending "empty" in the middle of a window pane, which was meant to indicate that the "word" at that juncture in the structure should be taken as whatever the viewer could see out the window.

Although Diagrams Series 3 has only had a post-composition existence (up until now!) on paper, its successor work, Diagrams Series 4, has had a long life on-line, initially appearing even before the advent of the World Wide Web on the Artcom Electronic Network on The WELL.

The diagram work resulted from a confrontation with a concept called Tone Clusters I had heard about as an undergraduate from my friends who were involved in music. The moment I heard the term I thought it was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard of, and immediately wanted to do the same thing with words. But, there was a problem. What to do with syntax? What is the "part of speech" of a word cluster? Does this question even make sense? Of course one way of dealing with this problem was to simply abandon syntax, but I did not want to do this. I wanted a way to make word clusters, where words are juxtaposed directly, without giving up the ability to combine these clusters into the kind of larger structure we know as sentences. The solution to this dilemma that occurred to me in 1968 was to move syntax out of the words themselves and into a separate channel. Thus was born the idea of showing the syntax directly, using a diagram notation. It is a concept I have been exploring ever since.

The implementation of the initial impetus of this work -- word clusters -- is quite primitive in Diagrams Series 3: the elements of a cluster are shown using conventional kinds of typography, separated only by a colon. It was not until approximately 1987 that I realized that at long last I could actually implement word clusters in a way very close to my original vision using a computer interactively, with the words overlaid on a graphical screen, using the mouse to allow individual elements of a cluster to be viewed. While the implementation presented here has a facade of interactivity, in truth these works are not really interactive at all in the conventional sense. However, I remember being taken even as early as 1969 by the idea that some day it would be possible to use a computer screen to "fly over" a diagram which could then become arbitrarily large. It is thus not too much of a stretch to describe this work as "ready to become" interactive.

Throughout the years that I was creating diagram poems on paper, I was entreated many times for statements on poetics. I resisted -- an attitude which some of my contemporaries found puzzling. It would have been impossible for me at the time to have explained exactly why creating a poetics statement was something I simply must not do; I believe now that I had an intuitive understanding that I had to arrive at a place somewhere beyond the diagram work before I could do this. As I moved, years later, toward completion of Intergrams, I realized that Intergrams was that place.

As I look back on these poems from a distance of more than 20 years, I see them as a kind of launching. There is still so much left to be done. We are at a crucial moment in the history of the word. The advent of the World Wide Web has made at least some form of hypertext a commonplace experience. Everyone now knows that multiplicities can be brought into the word stream. But we are only at the beginning of an understanding of what it means to "write native" to a medium in which any element can be connected directly to any other element. The danger is that complacency with our current understanding of tools such as "web browsers" could set in, closing off a confrontation with the fullest extreme of writing to full connectivity and full juxtaposition; in the end we may lose this hinge point in the history of the word. Let's hope we don't lose this moment. It is an exciting time.

Grindstone, PA
October, 2002

Diagrams Series 3